[Sca-cooks] Re: Sca-cooks Digest,Smoked Meat and Fish Questions

[UrthMomma at aol.com]

In my experience, meats that are sufficiently preserved to survive Pennsic 
without refrigeration are either a )canned, b)dry as jerky - they snap, c) 
heavily salted and or sugared to a degree that direct consumption will cause 
digestive upset, or d)a combination of  b and c, such as dry sausages, which rely on 
salt, sugar, dryness and fat . Salt meats keep well, and age well, but our 
modern culture has mostly forgotten the process other than Smithfield hams and 
proscuitto. Smoke alone is not a sufficient preservative. Add drying or salt, 
yes, smoke alone, no. 

You can make your own cured meats and fish, salted and dried or brined, dried 
and smoked, however you will need to soak the cured meat or fish overnight or 
use it as seasoning for a pot of beans or peas or rice as it will be very 
salty and your tummy will not enjoy  the effects of direct consumption. I've 
cured  and smoked home butchered pork and you *really* want to soak the ham 
overnight, pitch the soak water and start the simmer with fresh water. The same 
procedure goes for home cured "Devonshire ham" which is curing a leg of lamb the 
same way that you cure pork. If you use a curing agent with saltpeter, such as 
Tenderquick or your own concoction, the lamb will also be as pink as ham or 
corned beef. I also make a salted spiced beef, but it only cures for ten days in 
a fridge and is baked, pressed and sliced. It's dry, but I would not trust it 
in temps above 50 degrees for prolonged periods. 

Salt beef was the usual method of preserving beef in period, dried beef in 
the little jars is as close as you will find today's grocery, probably, and it's 
not the best by itself, again kinda salty.  Again, fish can be pickled and 
smoked, aka "blind robins" but they also need to be really dried out or soaked 
in vinegar to withstand August in PA.

>From tales I remember from my father and grandmother of farm life in the days 
before rural electrification, summer was a time for not a whole lot of meat 
and what you had was cured meat : corned beef in a pickle barrel in the cellar, 
smoked hams that you scraped the mold off of and cut  a slice to make red-eye 
gravy with, soaked a ham for Sunday dinner if the preacher was coming,  ham 
hocks to cook with beans, chicken in early summer only if a rooster got too 
nasty  or hens needed to be culled, otherwise you waited until the spring hatch 
grew big enough to eat the cockerels or until fall butchering time. Potted 
meats ( meats preserved in fat) were used, but were put down in late fall at 
butchering time, keep in a cold cellar and were best used up before the weather got 
warm in the spring.  Please see Koge Bog, published in 1616 in Denmark for 
very close to period  methods of meat preservation that were still in use in 
livling memory.
 <A HREF="http://www.forest.gen.nz/Medieval/articles/cooking/1616.html">Click here: http://www.forest.gen.nz/Medieval/articles/cooking/1616.html</A> 

Unless you can find a way to keep a  meat pickle crock with a strong vinegar 
and salt/sugar brine, you will have difficulty finding a way to have meat that 
is can be eaten without refrigeration *and* without cooking. We arrived on 
the first Tuesday of Pennsic this year. At Pennsic, I did eat out of such a 
concoction for the first several days with a small bit of ice. At home, a couple 
of days before we left, I sliced eye of round roast beef thinly. layered it in 
a quart mason jar  with a few pinches of the spice mixture used in Lords' Salt 
per the Miscellany,and filled the rest of the jar with balsamic vinegar, 6% 
acidity, screwed down the top and kept the meat submerged in the vinegar. I 
kept it in the beer and pop cooler which ran out of ice and made it up to 70 
degrees a couple of times. I even left it out on the table as couple of times for 
several hours.  I ate all the beef, suffered no ill effects and reused the 
pickle for a batch of Italian sauage that I boiled up, cut into 1" chunks and 
threw it into the pickle and added more balsamic vinegar. Consumed that batch and 
threw out the last of it on the last Friday as  I needed the space for 
packing small stuff. More experimention with cider vinegar, salt and sugar,, spices 
and meats is needed. Section XI in Koge Bog gives some pretty good guidelines.

Way back before dirt, circa Pensic 2 or 3,  Duke Andrew of Seldom Rest did 
similar experimentation with mixed pickle crocks of cooked polish sausage and 
vegetables. We ate it , we survived. Pickled eggs, pickled bolonga, pickled 
sausages are standard bar and beer carryout fare in Ohio. The pickle jars stand on 
the bar or on the carryout counters. The proprieter takes a tong and fishes 
out what you want and puts the lid back on. Pickled eggs, sausages and bolonga 
are available in local groceries in jars, even at Meijer's, a large MI, IN, OH 
chain. 

Homemade summer sausage is another possibility, but be careful to get the 
right amount of salt/curing agents ( too much is really nasty) and to dry it out 
well, but not to cook out much of the fat. Over the last twentyfive  years, 
I've made several hundred pounds of the stuff and made every mistake there is. 

Landjaeger sausage is also good in the summer if you can get it, as are a 
number of the dry German sausages, but I don't know which ones are strictly beef, 
and  any are heaven with a bit of Muenster cheese, a crusty hunk of rye bread 
and a cold beer. 

Dammit, now I gotta go find a good recipe for Landjaeger sausage.

Olwen Buklond
Barony of Sternfeld, Midrealm

In a message dated 9/21/2003 8:36:12 AM US Eastern Standard Time,  Cariadoc 
writes:

> As I think I said in my original post, part of the objective is to 
> have things that don't require cooking. At Pennsic this year, the 
> encampment was down to just the four of us, and getting a fire going 
> and cooking a meal over it is a good deal of trouble for two adults 
> and two kids. So I thought it would be useful to have more things 
> that could be eaten cold.
> 
> We do use beef salami, and beef or turkey sausage, and apples, and 
> bread, and melons, and ...  . But I was looking for some more things, 
> and smoked meat and fish seemed like plausible candidates that I 
> didn't know enough about.
> -- 
> David/Cariadoc
>